


different verse (same as the first)

by TolkienGirl



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Brotherly Love, Captain America: The First Avenger, Friendship, Gen, Maglor (Tolkien) Through History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 23:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18670198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: The man looks nothing like Fingon. (And yet.)





	different verse (same as the first)

The man looks nothing like Fingon.

His hair is tawny blonde, cut short and neat as has been the fashion for centuries. Maglor sacrificed his own braids long ago, though the only loss was memory—they had become matted with salt and seaweed, from the years in which he tried (and failed) to drown.

So. This man does not have Fingon’s hair, nor Fingon’s face, nor yet his smile—but he does have Fingon’s eyes. And there is something more than his eyes, if one looks closely. There is an air about him that reminds Maglor of nothing so much as Fingon in Valinor.

That is likely because the man is very young.

 

They are going to win this war. Sometimes Maglor sees only the past and sometimes only the future, but here the two are muddled together in a manner which makes him wonder if he is drifting towards being human. As an almost-human, then, he sees one thing with clarity: they are going to win this war in 1945.

He knows this, and says nothing.

Maglor, human or not, has learned to say nothing.

 

The whole world is following this man with interest, this man who punched Hitler in the face a hundred times. Maglor has seen this age’s ogre, and recognizes the threads of Melkor’s song, if not his might.

This world understands so little of might—and yet, so much of cruelty.

Maglor only follows this man because he has Fingon’s eyes. And if he has Fingon’s eyes, if some part of him truly  _is_  Fingon—there must be another Maedhros, too.

 

(Maglor did not see him fall. He saw only the steady eyes and trembling lips, lit blinding white and stormy red, and when he blinked, his brother was gone.)

 

“Sometimes,” Maglor said to a poet, once—a man who would write of hell, “Only the fire remains.”

Dante did not listen, and sketched out hell as ice.

 

“I’m not much of a captain, yet. There are privates braver than I am.” He doesn’t seem to be sure of his hands, of the width of his shoulders. The furrow in his brow is quite like Fingolfin’s. Maglor hasn’t thought of his— _uncle_ —in nearly six hundred years. He has thought of his brothers more frequently, Fingon more frequently, but only because Fingon is the path to Maedhros and Maedhros is Maglor’s last and greatest loss.

“Bravery,” Maglor says, picking at a hearty and somewhat vile stew, “Is hardly the most important thing a man has.”

The man blinks. His eyelashes are as long as Noldorin eyelashes, if Maglor is remembering correctly. They are also tipped with gold.

(Maedhros)

(The man looks nothing like—)

“What do you think is most important, Lieutenant?”

Maglor is a lieutenant here. Which means that the answer is not likely  _patience_ , as it was in the third age, or  _perseverance_ , as it was in Rome. “Hope,” he says, without really believing it. “A man must have hope.”

 

The captain marches into hell—neither fire nor ice, exactly—and saves a man who looks nothing like Maedhros.

(And yet.)

Maglor watches, and breathes, and realizes that it does not matter that their smiles are not the same.

 

_Don’t do anything stupid._

_How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you._

Is he seeing the past, or the future, or is he seeing something that belongs to him?

 

“You were right about hope, Lieutenant,” Captain Rogers says, with Fingon’s eyes shining bright in his young face.

“Was I?” Maglor asks. He was the one who found Fingon’s banner, blue and silver gone ruined and red. Maedhros had been occupied, horribly, with trying to find his face.

So much red, and white, and blue.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” says Rogers’ Maedhros, and he shakes Maglor’s hand before Rogers can answer the question.

Maglor gives a name that isn’t his.

“Bucky Barnes,” says not-Maedhros, and the charm rolls off him in a wave.

Maglor is familiar with the sensation of almost drowning.

 

Barnes dies in the mountains, because Rogers could not reach his hand in time.

Rogers is lost in ice. Different poets might draw different meanings, from that, but Maglor—

Maglor did not see him fall.


End file.
